Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

If we do tell people where we are going, they ask in genuine puzzlement, “What are you going to do there all alone?” We hardly know what to answer, though, for we are heading down a dark pathway in our lives. “I want time to think things over, I guess,” we say a little lamely. But then it turns out that once we are out there, we don’t really think in any way that produces definite results. Instead, we walk the beaches or the back streets. We sit in the park or the movie theater. We watch the people and the clouds. “I didn’t do much of anything,” we report upon our return. And we feel a little defensive, as though we had failed to deliver on our promise. You should not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out during your transition points, for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence. The activities of your ordinary life keep you “you” by presenting you with a set of signals that are difficult to respond to in any but the old way. Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation. But you don’t do it as you do ordinary things, for it is in the walking, watching, making coffee, counting the birds on the phone wire, studying the cracks in the plaster ceiling over the bed, dreaming, and waiting for God-knows-what to happen that you are carrying on the basic industry of the neutral zone, which is attentive inactivity and rituali...